Unless you assume people will work out of goodness of their hearts, every system has to somehow coerce people to work. You can’t fulfill everyone’s basic needs without workers.
And yes, maybe people would do some types of work anyway, but good luck finding people who find working in sanitation as an interesting hobby.
Someone would probably engineer a new sanitation machine or system that doesn’t need as much human labor or exposure with unsanitary stuff as an interesting hobby. But yeah, people would have to build communities and the sense of community, and come to a consensus on how that community would want to divide labor; i.e. the community could vote to take turns doing undesirable jobs, or allow people to in undesirable jobs to work less hours or something.
Now that I think of it, things could be radically different if everyone is exposed to the undesirable work. Communities would probably opt for composting and less or compostable packaging in lieu of having to do a lot of trash work. They’d probably opt to eat less meat rather than working at a slaughterhouse.
It’s interesting but you did not answer the issue. What do you do when someone refuses to do the work assigned to them. Do you coerce them (so same as capitalism) or do you just let them off and encourage more people to refuse as well, because why should they do it if others don’t.
They’d be hurting their family, friends, and community, and risk becoming ostracized. That should keep most people on the shared vision. Everybody having a say from voting or some shared consensus gives people ownership over decisions and should increase cooperation. There would likely still be some people who wouldn’t cooperate, in which case they can leave or be voted out of the community and try to join another, which I suppose is coercion. I suppose there could also be lighter consequences for not doing what the community agreed upon (sanitation duty or peeling onions or whatever) that the person could choose to do if they wanted to stay.
I should say that in these hypotheticals I’m envisioning an anarcho-syndicalist or perhaps market-socialist type of society made up of a network or federation of smaller communities. I don’t think this would work very well if it was one nation-sized “community,” because people likely wouldn’t care as much about the plights of people on the other side of the country.
So an even stronger type of coercion. Since in capitalism, you can earn money in any way you like and are able to. Here it is what you are assigned or banishment. It’s nice you throw in words like community, but this is a very authoritarian regime at it’s core.
You get banished from your employer under capitalism, and don’t have a vote on anything the employer does. I don’t typically think of truly democratic systems as authoritarian; everyone comes to a consensus to what work everyone is “assigned” to do.
There are 10s of thousands of employers and you can often be self employed as well. There isn’t a one employer that can banish you. But yes, in many cases, employers do have some amount of power over you. However, what you describe already exists. It’s called working for the government. How well is the democracy working out for government employees?
Making sure everyone has basic needs doesn’t mean you don’t pay people to work. People would work because they want the other things you get from money aside from survival.
I think that people need a purpose and I think in a society not based on maximization of profit, people would have the ability to choose what that is and not have to do “whatever pays the bills”
Imagine a society where your doctors want to be doctors and your musicians want to be musicians.
In my experience watching my father retire and just living as an adult, people get squirrely when they dont have something to work on.
Work doesn’t have to be what capitalism values to be work, it can ve creation, it can be gardening, it can be helping others.
Id argue people do fundamentally have drive to work as they have drive to have purpose. Work just isn’t necessarily the suffering capitalism has led us to believe it is.
Yes and no. There fundamentally are jobs that are both necessary and unpleasant. It is easy to talk about things like gardening and art, but we need sanitation. Even some level of bureaucracy. There are many kinds of work people may be willing to do for free or cheaply, but also many types of work almost no one would.
PS: You can actually see this in volunteer driven open-source software projects. There are many volunteers to develop features or even fix bugs, but they sorely lack management roles and work on important but niche features (unused by most volunteers) like accessibility for blind people.
Idk I know nurses and janitors that actually enjoy that work. Some people do enjoy doing sanitation and we should let those who enjoy it do it and get their needs met for it. Perhaps the unpleasant jobs should get more incentive? (Currently that’s not the case)
Anyway my main point is incentive instead of coercion. People should all play their part in society but should have their needs met no matter how they choose to play that part. Society not based on maximization of profit would value different jobs than our current Society.
Ok, where do you get those benefits from? Someone needs to work on those, and they will also require benefits. If people don’t have to work, some portion will inevitably either not work or work hobby like jobs (that don’t usually produce very attractive benefits). So you have less things being produced and require more things to guarantee everyone’s needs and significant benefits for working peoples on top of that.
You seem to be under the impression that everything that’s being “produced” right now is of actual value and must be kept up or replaced under a non-capitalistic system. I’d argue the contrary. There is so much braindead wasted labor being performed and energy wasted in the current system that would be completely freed up if our main economic goal were to change from “growth and competition at all cost” to “ensure a good life for everyone”.
At the same time, our ever increasing ability to automate work and solar energy becoming incredibly cheap means that less and less of the necessary production actually requires human labor.
Add to that that most people like to have community and purpose, and would be happy to give back to a society that guarantees their wellbeing for rather modest reward, and I really don’t think finding enough people to do the actually necessary work would be a big issue at all. Kids that stock up their pocket money by mowing lawns are basically already making that exact deal.
Ok, as long as I don’t have to participate in this “utopia” of yours and can keep living as I do, go for it. Of course if you need to coerce others to participate, you may have lost the plot somewhere.
I agree with you, I have thought a lot about a hypothetical reality where people work paid jobs for 1 or 2 days a week (or 50-100 days a year) to do the things needed for society to function and spend the rest as they wish.
It seems somewhat achievable compared to abolishing coerced work all together.
There are many volunteers to develop features or even fix bugs, but they sorely lack management roles and work on important but niche features (unused by most volunteers) like accessibility for blind people.
Those volunteers are still volunteers inside a capitalistic system that have to get by somehow. Of course they’re going to spend their extremely limited free time on the things that benefit them directly (features they need, bugs that affect them). The incentive structure is set up against them. That would be very different if they didn’t have the pressure of keeping afloat in spite of their volunteer work.
Perhaps, but whether it is by knowing my self or people I work with, I kinda doubt that.
Also, what exactly is it that you would need to bootstrap a group like this? Does it involve coercing people that want to keep capitalism to participate?
Having an underclass and (monetarily) coercing everyone to do their fair share of work to meet everyone’s needs are two very different things. If I need to spell that out for you, you may want to think about these things and how they would look in practice a bit more for yourself before discussing them.
A billionaire’s family isn’t under threat of dying if they don’t get a job. They already have what something like UBI would give to everyone else. The only way to use pay to force labor is to have people so poor that not having an income would lead to their death.
Everyone refusing to work would always lead to everyone’s death. Blame God for making reality this way. People must be coerced to work when needed.
But you immediately jumping to the opposite extreme case as if there were only two options shows you have no interest in actually understanding what I am saying. Can’t teach someone who doesn’t want to learn. So I think we are done here.
Unless you assume people will work out of goodness of their hearts, every system has to somehow coerce people to work. You can’t fulfill everyone’s basic needs without workers.
And yes, maybe people would do some types of work anyway, but good luck finding people who find working in sanitation as an interesting hobby.
Someone would probably engineer a new sanitation machine or system that doesn’t need as much human labor or exposure with unsanitary stuff as an interesting hobby. But yeah, people would have to build communities and the sense of community, and come to a consensus on how that community would want to divide labor; i.e. the community could vote to take turns doing undesirable jobs, or allow people to in undesirable jobs to work less hours or something.
Now that I think of it, things could be radically different if everyone is exposed to the undesirable work. Communities would probably opt for composting and less or compostable packaging in lieu of having to do a lot of trash work. They’d probably opt to eat less meat rather than working at a slaughterhouse.
It’s interesting but you did not answer the issue. What do you do when someone refuses to do the work assigned to them. Do you coerce them (so same as capitalism) or do you just let them off and encourage more people to refuse as well, because why should they do it if others don’t.
You reward those willing to do the hard jobs. Coercion’s ethical cousin is called “incentive”.
Capitalism also calls salary incentive.
Calling a Nazi a socialist doesn’t make it one. Calling me a duck doesn’t make me one.
They’d be hurting their family, friends, and community, and risk becoming ostracized. That should keep most people on the shared vision. Everybody having a say from voting or some shared consensus gives people ownership over decisions and should increase cooperation. There would likely still be some people who wouldn’t cooperate, in which case they can leave or be voted out of the community and try to join another, which I suppose is coercion. I suppose there could also be lighter consequences for not doing what the community agreed upon (sanitation duty or peeling onions or whatever) that the person could choose to do if they wanted to stay.
I should say that in these hypotheticals I’m envisioning an anarcho-syndicalist or perhaps market-socialist type of society made up of a network or federation of smaller communities. I don’t think this would work very well if it was one nation-sized “community,” because people likely wouldn’t care as much about the plights of people on the other side of the country.
So an even stronger type of coercion. Since in capitalism, you can earn money in any way you like and are able to. Here it is what you are assigned or banishment. It’s nice you throw in words like community, but this is a very authoritarian regime at it’s core.
You get banished from your employer under capitalism, and don’t have a vote on anything the employer does. I don’t typically think of truly democratic systems as authoritarian; everyone comes to a consensus to what work everyone is “assigned” to do.
There are 10s of thousands of employers and you can often be self employed as well. There isn’t a one employer that can banish you. But yes, in many cases, employers do have some amount of power over you. However, what you describe already exists. It’s called working for the government. How well is the democracy working out for government employees?
Preach. We are so deep into capitalism that we forget how we could do things “the human way”
Making sure everyone has basic needs doesn’t mean you don’t pay people to work. People would work because they want the other things you get from money aside from survival.
I think that people need a purpose and I think in a society not based on maximization of profit, people would have the ability to choose what that is and not have to do “whatever pays the bills”
Imagine a society where your doctors want to be doctors and your musicians want to be musicians.
In my experience watching my father retire and just living as an adult, people get squirrely when they dont have something to work on.
Work doesn’t have to be what capitalism values to be work, it can ve creation, it can be gardening, it can be helping others.
Id argue people do fundamentally have drive to work as they have drive to have purpose. Work just isn’t necessarily the suffering capitalism has led us to believe it is.
Yes and no. There fundamentally are jobs that are both necessary and unpleasant. It is easy to talk about things like gardening and art, but we need sanitation. Even some level of bureaucracy. There are many kinds of work people may be willing to do for free or cheaply, but also many types of work almost no one would.
PS: You can actually see this in volunteer driven open-source software projects. There are many volunteers to develop features or even fix bugs, but they sorely lack management roles and work on important but niche features (unused by most volunteers) like accessibility for blind people.
Idk I know nurses and janitors that actually enjoy that work. Some people do enjoy doing sanitation and we should let those who enjoy it do it and get their needs met for it. Perhaps the unpleasant jobs should get more incentive? (Currently that’s not the case)
Anyway my main point is incentive instead of coercion. People should all play their part in society but should have their needs met no matter how they choose to play that part. Society not based on maximization of profit would value different jobs than our current Society.
Well, then make those jobs come with benefits proportional to their unattractiveness
Ok, where do you get those benefits from? Someone needs to work on those, and they will also require benefits. If people don’t have to work, some portion will inevitably either not work or work hobby like jobs (that don’t usually produce very attractive benefits). So you have less things being produced and require more things to guarantee everyone’s needs and significant benefits for working peoples on top of that.
You seem to be under the impression that everything that’s being “produced” right now is of actual value and must be kept up or replaced under a non-capitalistic system. I’d argue the contrary. There is so much braindead wasted labor being performed and energy wasted in the current system that would be completely freed up if our main economic goal were to change from “growth and competition at all cost” to “ensure a good life for everyone”. At the same time, our ever increasing ability to automate work and solar energy becoming incredibly cheap means that less and less of the necessary production actually requires human labor.
Add to that that most people like to have community and purpose, and would be happy to give back to a society that guarantees their wellbeing for rather modest reward, and I really don’t think finding enough people to do the actually necessary work would be a big issue at all. Kids that stock up their pocket money by mowing lawns are basically already making that exact deal.
Ok, as long as I don’t have to participate in this “utopia” of yours and can keep living as I do, go for it. Of course if you need to coerce others to participate, you may have lost the plot somewhere.
I agree with you, I have thought a lot about a hypothetical reality where people work paid jobs for 1 or 2 days a week (or 50-100 days a year) to do the things needed for society to function and spend the rest as they wish. It seems somewhat achievable compared to abolishing coerced work all together.
Adding another comment to address this PS.:
Those volunteers are still volunteers inside a capitalistic system that have to get by somehow. Of course they’re going to spend their extremely limited free time on the things that benefit them directly (features they need, bugs that affect them). The incentive structure is set up against them. That would be very different if they didn’t have the pressure of keeping afloat in spite of their volunteer work.
Perhaps, but whether it is by knowing my self or people I work with, I kinda doubt that.
Also, what exactly is it that you would need to bootstrap a group like this? Does it involve coercing people that want to keep capitalism to participate?
So you are in favor of keeping an underclass of people that you can threaten with death to force them to work?
Having an underclass and (monetarily) coercing everyone to do their fair share of work to meet everyone’s needs are two very different things. If I need to spell that out for you, you may want to think about these things and how they would look in practice a bit more for yourself before discussing them.
A billionaire’s family isn’t under threat of dying if they don’t get a job. They already have what something like UBI would give to everyone else. The only way to use pay to force labor is to have people so poor that not having an income would lead to their death.
That is called an underclass.
Everyone refusing to work would always lead to everyone’s death. Blame God for making reality this way. People must be coerced to work when needed.
But you immediately jumping to the opposite extreme case as if there were only two options shows you have no interest in actually understanding what I am saying. Can’t teach someone who doesn’t want to learn. So I think we are done here.
This right here is where you go wrong. It is simply untrue. You’re just using it to disguise how much you want to advocate for slavery.
How is it untrue? And how is working to secure your own needs slavery? Are you living in a fairytale world?
Feigning ignorance? Okay, slaver.